A Study On The Application Of Task-based Language Teaching To Business English Interpreting Teaching In Higher Vocational Colleges

With the development of economic globalization, communications between different countries have become increasingly important, which results in an increasing demand of business interpreters who have a good mastery of both English knowledge and business skills. In order to cater to this trend, many higher vocational colleges have begun to offer business interpreting classes, during the process of which different kinds of teaching methods have been practiced with different kinds of teaching achievements. Consequently, many scholars have done a lot of researches, with the purpose of indentifying a specific kind of teaching approach which is effective and efficient in business English interpreting classes.Generated from communicative language teaching, Task-based Language Teaching(TBLT) is a kind of teaching approach focusing on the importance of tasks, which has been a popular teaching approach in the process of language teaching since 1990 s. The purpose of this teaching approach is to grant students the ability to apply the language they have learnt when completing tasks designed before classes. Taking “learning by doing” as its major principle, Task-based Language Teaching has been regarded as an effective way of language teaching particularly in business interpreting classes in higher vocational school in the present days. It focuses on the practical application of language, which makes it geared to the current need of language teaching in China.Although TBLT has attracted much attention from English teachers and educators aiming at finding effective ways of English teaching, there are not many empirical researches testifying the outcomes of applying TBLT in business interpreting classes. At the same time, many teachers and scholars think the disadvantages of applying TBLT to English teaching overweighing the advantages. Therefore, the reported impressive outcomes resulted from the application of TBLT should be further justified by empirical experiments. As a result, in order to testify the effectiveness and feasibility of the application of TBLT in business English interpreting classes, empirical experiment of this method seems to be significant,.This thesis is designed to testify the outcomes of applying TBLT into the process of business English interpreting classes in higher vocational colleges. The empirical experiment lasted for a semester(five months) with students majoring in business English in a vocational college in Qing Huang Dao City, Hebei Province chosen as the subjects. Methodologies adopted in this thesis are mainly interviews with teachers and some of the students, questionnaires, pre-test and post-test. By those methodologies, this thesis aims to figuring out whether students’ learning motivation can be improved and better teaching effects can be reached, with the adoption of TBLT as the only experiment variable.Through the analysis of the authentic data acquired from the research methods listed above, this thesis proves that the students’ learning motivation can be improved significantly by applying TBLT to business English interpretation teaching, resulting in better teaching effects. Last, the effectiveness is proved of applying TBLT in business English interpreting classes in higher vocational colleges in comparison to the traditional PPP(Presentation, Practice and Production) approach. Limitations and suggestions for future research have also been included in this thesis.